Three powerful people
seized me, held me at gunpoint,
and demanded answers. They didn’t want money.

The face is featureless, 
As though bound in tight gauze, 
And therefore presents a mien 

This is not the Roman Campagna.
Arcadian shepherds are absent.
The myths here are Icelandic sagas

I go for silence
to the rear of my closet.
I’m safe from sound there.

But suppose, Irina, you find yourself asking:
What is the word for window?
And a voice, your own or someone else's, replies

Glass breaking and then laughter
under the open window—
a rabble of carousers

Foremost in slaughter, Jonathan
                  Dipped his lance
Idly into a stray honeycomb

That far rise drifting in its first mute buds
Brightens and freezes through binoculars,
Shadeless grain of the giver. As if grown

I watched Preacher Benson plowing his back garden with a mule
to the sprung clacking of the screen door,
and it’ll sound that way when the century turns.